Honours Year 2019

This blogpost shall document the production of my Honours Animation film which is yet to be titled. For a while I thought 'The Last Wizard' might be what this project should be called but I haven't yet been wholly satisfied with it due to its glaring similarity to 'Star Wars: The Last Jedi'. But hey, there can't only be one 'The Last of' title after The Last Jedi  right?

**Warning** This will be long and tedious for me to write and you, dear reader, to read.

In the beginning...
I'd competed my Bachelor's Degree in Fine Arts last year and before then I'd been ruminating on whether I should continue my study with getting an Honours degree which would mean another year to my already drawn-out uni career. I really wasn't sure what I was going to do with my career, my artwork, not sure where to go. I had vague ideas relating to hitching off other people's projects and getting work that way, but as usual, it's easier said than done and as an artist starting out, student films don't offer any monetary compensation which is pertinent to a twenty-something artist with no direction. So I looked at the options of extending my study with an Honours course at the same university and went to a seminar on what Honours could offer. One of the key aspects of the course would be that I could produce a piece and it would extend into something that I could do after the course ended in a semi-professional capacity. That was what won me over because it was appealing to do whatever you liked, but also the possibility that if I was making something I could learn new things and then carry it over onto whatever came next. There's also a sense of security with being a student and having spent more time at uni than most, I can attest to the fact that age doesn't play a role in when you become or stop being a student. It's a bit juvenile I suppose to not want to leave it all and move on, but I can't think of a place more suited to facilitating young artists in whatever field that may be. I came into academia hoping to get by and get a degree and move onto what I wanted to do, but I became disillusioned by the course which was pulling me in different directions and I found myself skimming my coursework to do drawings in my own time. One thing I wish I could tell my younger self six years ago would be to make my uni experience work for me, and not the other way around. I only picked up on this new motivational trajectory late into my last two years of my Bachelor's degree; I was going to turn the coursework to my advantage, I would bring in elements of illustration, films and artists I loved and make my work that way. There's no greater feeling of loss of purpose than getting through a degree and thinking 'what am I doing?' when the question should be centered on 'who do I want to be?' Along the way I also realized the importance of academia that many (and myself initially) had squandered for a certificate. When I received my degree, the certificate was a single document, my degree was actually in all those years milling about, failing a unit, finding myself and working towards making work I was happy with. The journey to this moment was the reward as cheesy and cliched as it is to say. I have a great deal of respect for higher-education now than I did six years ago and I will always be indebted to the friends, teachers and people around me during those years as a testament to who I am now.

After I 'graduated' (I deferred the ceremony for convenience) I took a few months off to do some casual work and mull over the choice of Honours and decided I'd try my hand at animation, specifically stop motion animation. I want to point out here that not only was I a severely shoddy novice to traditional animation, I'm also barely practiced with stop motion aside from some crude little tests I'd done almost a decade earlier with lego in my bedroom. I'd set my phone atop a little base I'd rigged with blu-tack and made little puffs of smoke with some stuffing from a chewed-up dog toy and had lighting effects to show a teleporting villain.

Some of the impetus to want to do stop motion came from me nearly attending college in England before I left for Australia. The course I wanted to get into was Media Studies and part of the entry requirements were to create a flipbook animation which I never finished and at the time of this post, probably never will :).


Gromples, Wine, Witches and Wizards
For some time over the last few years I drew these Gromple creatures (also mentioned in earlier posts on this blog) which developed as a sort of escapism - I couldn't draw humans, so I drew these small creatures dressed in Victorian garb who lived in their own little world as something of a fairy/sprite mythology.

I was thinking of creating a small book, a compendium of these Gromples and other creatures that would be documented by a zoologist or some wizard living in a quaint village in the countryside. The Gromples were a clean slate, an opportunity to create my own world and do what I wanted to do. I'd taken opportunities to insert these characters into various other projects and even a mural outside Arlechin, a wine bar behind Grossi Florentino's, a distinguished Italian restaurant. The piece was done in a furious race within two weeks, on cold-pressed watercolour paper with a single fine biro pen. There are elements I still love about the piece, such as some of the tree and the family of Gromples. What followed was a mad process of getting the thing scanned, at a crazy resolution, broken into 'tiles' by my old friend Corey Bransden, who is a wizard with photoshop, and then printing them at a whopping a1 size. Those 51 sheets were then transported into the city where with help from my family, we pasted them to the wall using a homemade concoction of wheat paste.  There the Gromples served fittingly as odd creatures that you weren't quite sure were friendly or creepy and for a while at least, it looked wonderful and I thought worked with the theme of the Arlechin - the trickster/jester. Flash forward a year and the work was beginning to fray and tatter, as did my confidence that what I'd done was right for the bar who seemed to like my work. What will become of it is anyone's guess - if they replace it, I won't be disappointed, it was an experience and things don't last forever.

Where I was going to take the Gromples in Honours was something I began to seriously think about at the start of the year. I thought they were so open-ended that I could make any story with them that I'd like, but their time to shine is yet to come. I can't pinpoint when I abandoned the Gromples (temporarily of course) but I began to think about another idea I'd always wanted to create. My love for magic, witches and wizards goes back a long way, far back to my childhood - before Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter were film franchises. I'd draw witches, I loved broomsticks and would pretend to fly around my backyard and on occasion would dress up as a witch. I fell in love with the design of the witch - who wore a large, black pointed hat, a black cloak and a pointy nose and carrying a broomstick. Here are some early inspiration for witches I had obsessed over in my early years:

Witchiepoo from H.R. Pufnstuf

The main cast of A Simple Wish 

The Sanderson Sisters from Hocus Pocus 

Marge Simpson as a witch from The Simpson's Treehouse of Horror VIII

The Big Three:
Around 2001, three giant franchises were to come about and both extend over a decade following their success with sequels and prequels and a spark of creative magic was lit within me. I can't describe how wondrous those worlds were to me growing up, they were rich in detail and were celebrations of the craft of film making that I won't hesitate to attribute my love for film and art had stemmed from. Harry Potter would become such a pivotal role in my life as I grew up with the books and films and in some way I felt I could connect with Harry and his time at Hogwarts parallel to my own school life. Not only was Harry Potter something I would escape into the world of, I felt it was something I could join with both family and friends, it really was a phenomenon to experience and living in England at the time, it all made the world seem close enough to touch. The Lord of the Rings was another of those giants of the film world, it was a trilogy ahead of it's time to borrow a probably overrated phrase. To this day, approaching nigh on twenty years, the films have stood the test of time and have reasserted the power of fantasy into a realistic world - based in New Zealand and constructed in sets both big and small and big-small and small-big! You could watch the four hour commentaries, read the extensive and varied  making-of books and only scratch the surface of the art and creativity that went into creating Middle-earth.

Around this time another franchise began to fight for my attention and I began a crazed worship of all three alternating to one as another film in their franchise would be released - this was Star Wars. Some of my oldest film memories span back to watching Star Wars A New Hope and firmly cementing in my mind the powerful image of Darth Vader. One common thread ran through all three franchises - magic - and across three different historical periods - the past, present and future (Star Wars is futuristic okay, no matter if it is meant to be 'a long long time ago...') It all fed into my love for wizards and witches and presenting them in fairly believable and tangible worlds. I can tell you I never left these worlds behind, I like to dip my toes into them whenever I get the chance and thankfully due to their continued success, there's always another story around the corner, more films and books. I'm not ashamed of this geek-culture I seem to abide by because so much of my happiness has come from living in those worlds that it feels natural to me.

Getting into it
If I was going to make a stop motion film, I was going to do something with wizards. I made a point of principle early on in the year and as a reminder going forward with Cabbage and the Magic Bow from last year; if I was going to write something or make it out of clay or whatever, the story had to have an emotional core, a message that would connect not only to the audience, but to me personally. It's perhaps the most daunting challenge because you're putting something out there that has to say something, anything that people can connect to. I spent most of my lunch breaks at work in the first few months of the year sketching very crude faces for a character I had yet to develop for this story, a character who would go by the name Penderwhist. Below are excerpts of my journal sketches from earlier this year:

One of the earliest designs, it would also become in a long, roundabout way, the design I would later carry to become the final one!

Notes from this page will date these 8/02/19 when I was still applying for the Honours course.

The face on the left was inspired by someone at my workplace, I gave him a beard and bushy eyebrows and voila: a wizard!

Finding 'The Face'
What I found interesting about designing a character ahead of the story was how, in time, and as of this post, is still in flux. The character will come through in each and every iteration. I liken this process to director Brad Bird's ideation for The Incredibles. He would ask a series of questions and each question would fill out another question and by the end of the process he had the characters and story for the film sorted or at least a good jumping board from which to launch the story. I think I was trying to capture some sort of animated aesthetic here which meant highlighting key features, making them more expressive etc. I played around with the idea that we couldn't see his eyes, he was so old that he couldn't open them without strain so I had the eyebrows much larger and gave him some glasses which would act like eyes. Hair, no hair? Beard, no beard? These were all still questions long after these initial sketches but that was the challenge, finding the face, 'the one'.

Somewhere in this process I found I wasn't getting anywhere, the designs needed something familiar to latch onto to then take on a life of it's own. I had a few faces in mind, but one stuck out - Jim Broadbent. I'd seen Broadbent in several things: he was Professor Kirke in the 2005 film adaptation of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, the villainous Sgt. Butterman in Hot Fuzz (2007), a brief role as Charles Stanforth in Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), and more notably for my love of Harry Potter - he portrayed Horace Slughorn in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince in 2009. He has these huge, beaming eyes and these cheeky cheeks that gave him a sense of mischief and curiosity that I thought were great matches for the character I wanted - if I was producing a multi-million dollar live-action film, I'd have hired Broadbent!

My sketches following this were bent towards incorporating Broadbent's face and twisting it for my purpose, and although I ultimately decided not to continue the investigations into developing my character with his likeness, I had taken a few peripheral design elements and later would incorporate them into the latest designs.

Top Right: Wallace, is that you?

The last 'Broadbent' wizard sketch.

Sculpting and 'Percy' 
Around this time (sometime in late April/early May) I just wasn't happy with where these sketches were going, it really was a frustrating time because it coincided with several assignments and I was extremely stressed that things weren't coming together. I began to work on parts of the story and another character, Percy, who would become a central figure of the story. There's only so much I can draw before it becomes solidified in my mind of what the character will look like that I got to a stage where 2D drawings weren't enough, to be able to further find the face I was looking for I began to sculpt it. Some sources of inspiration came from the concept maquettes produced by artist Kent Melton who has worked with several major studios to sculpt some truly iconic characters. I found Melton's work late in the game - around 2016 for Laika Studio's Kubo and the Two Strings a film that would kickstart my love for stop motion. Melton's work was slick, stylized and really captured whatever character that had come his way in the design process from the art department and although my first clay sculptures didn't look as refined as his were, I was really trying to set that as an admittedly high benchmark going forward. Below is the sculpt I did for finding the 'Broadbent-esque' face. I took as much time as I could afford to just sit there and do all the little details, the strands of hair and the beard and really getting to know the face over a couple of days. Most of this was done with a white colouring pencil that I found to be incredibly useful in a range of ways: if I needed small details I would use the very tip to 'push' the details out and if I wanted to form the general shape I would use the length of the tip to 'brush' the cheeks out etc. After I thought 'enough is enough' I would put the clay head in the oven and bake it for roughly 30 minutes.

Percy was a younger character than Penderwhist, and his story was constructed in a way that would link him to the wizard. I felt having this idea of legacy and age and also a sense of loss was important for the character and the story. Percy is Penderwhist's grandson - and as it turns out - the last wizard. The name I must confess is borrowed from a still ongoing Twine game I'm working on with Matthew Carcassi. There's something wizard-y I think about the name Percy and it seems to fit well with the quasi-medieval setting and with Penderwhist. Percy's design really came about from inspiration from another Laika stop motion film: ParaNorman (2012) and unlike Penderwhist, Percy's design process was thankfully streamlined, there weren't any unexpected twists and turns and I think having a certain emotion attached to him from the start made the process easier too.

The drawing above was done in one of my favourite journals - a moleskine sketchbook that has these lovely cream pages and a soft texture that really takes the graphite well, it's become a recent realization of mine that as light as I can go, it's fun to also work from the shadows and softly bring in light and shape and form as I'd found in this sketch:

I had a look at 12/13th century children's wear and settled upon this tunic that seems to be prevalent in a lot of fantasy and throughout history as a generic shirt, at any rate I wanted him to look poor, malnourished and perhaps he would be wearing clothes that were too big for him because that's all he could get his hands on. Another costume aspect was a scarf that he would wear, maybe he would use it to cover his face or it held some sentimental value. Perhaps it was given to him by his mother or father and is his only material connection to them? Perhaps he just likes the scarf and wants to wear whatever he likes?

This fleshing-out of detail that I've tried to employ is what is referred to as 'Worldbuilding' which is what writers and artists use to, well... build their world... Going back to Brad Bird's ideation process of asking questions, that's where I believe the true strength of worldbuilding comes into play, where I'm making considerations of time, place, object, historical connotations, materials, magic etc. which is where I'm at right now in the story process. The next few weeks of my break will be asking questions left, right and centre of where things are and where they're going, how Percy and Penderwhist meet, what role he has to play in the story, what is the goal of the story etc? Following these sketches I made two clay heads, of which I'll show the latest one here:

Whilst working on Percy's head, I began to realize that Percy was beginning to look more animated in style than Penderwhist and from this sculpt I went back and made revisions. Luckily all of the head sculpts have a little hole in the base with which I used to hold the thing whilst sculpting it and this meant I could later, if I felt like it, add it to a larger maquette. Which is what I started doing here:

This was essentially a very rough wireframe made from 'armature wire' which is useful for wanting your puppets to bend and move into durable poses, and here as formable wire skeleton for this maquette. One of things I love about this project is getting to do things that I never thought I'd do and making these sculpts and maquettes even before getting to the big stuff like the puppets is both fun and frightening. The wireframe above is in fact the second version, the first is sitting in a bag held together by E6000 glue, an epoxy that states it is known to cause cancer, yikes! That wireframe is tad bit smaller and in hidsight, might've been a bit more suitable for reasons I'll get into later. Some time into the sculpt I'd realized that I just couldn't go any further without a base. I'd foolishly spend an hour getting the legs and boots in a good state and then, *smoodge* I'd leave a finger-sized dent in the sculpt along with fingerprints. If I go missing one day, you could probably use this maquette as evidence to match my fingerprints to in some database.

The feet were huge loops of the wire that would be kind enough to give the maquette balance at certain stages.

I fashioned the base from a random piece of what looked like a slat or part of a shelving unit. I cut it down to size with a metal saw, not realizing there was a difference, and then epoxied the wireframe to to base with the cancer glue. Much better!

One unfortunate flaw I had to try and work around were the wireframe nubs of the hands - they were too big and there wasn't smaller wire which I could use to make the fingers. Lots of things went wrong on this maquette but I feel as if that's part of the process in that next time with what will be a larger Penderwhist maquette, I can make things a little more precise and streamlined.

The following are some shots in various stages of completion:

Some of my favourite details to work on were what I imagined to be were rough and simple embroidering on the hems and sleeves of his tunic which weren't sophisticated to fit in with his poor background. 

The cape was tough, it was as thin as the clay would get before breaking down, trying to get it to sit naturally on the body was a pain in the arse! The hood was going to be a true, folded hood, but it never looked right, so it became its own sculpted piece consisting of the three separate clay pieces that I blended to form one piece to give the illusion of a real hood.

The hands were the most difficult parts to sculpt and miraculously came out okay-ish. There weren't any wires for the fingers and I didn't have tools small enough to make the appropriate marks, but I think they turned out alright. Here's hoping the puppet hands turn out better!

Percy's laces do not make sense, but they look right for what they are here, a general concept.

The Wizard Returns...
Returning to Penderwhist, I went back to one of the earliest designs I'd scribbled months ago, it felt like the right direction to take as I was returning to some semblance of a 'traditional' wizard. You know, the one popularized by J.R.R. Tolkien's Gandalf and Merlin from Arthurian legends. Tolkien had based Gandalf off of a postcard his friend owned of an illustration depicting Odin. In the Saga of the Volsungs, Odin, appearing in human form is described as such:

'Now when the battle had gone on for some time, a man who had on a black cloak and a hat down low over his face entered the fray. had but one eye and in his hand he held a spear' 

Some believe this to be the inspiration for the look associated with what Tolkien would base Gandalf's appearance on: a hat, cloak, elderly and carrying a staff of some kind. Some attribute the pointy hat that witches and wizards wear as a precursor to what would become the 'dunce hat'. In its earlier incarnation the pointed hat seemed, like most superstitious and religious paraphernalia to point towards the heavens as a sign of ascendancy or being closer to the divine. Also the name 'Wizard' seems to come from the adjective 'wise' denoting a person of wisdom and knowledge. There's a whole host of occult and alchemical offshoots that depict a variety of functions of the wizard, as a philosopher, a magician, or someone who is just wise, I guess. For my purposes, I was going to go back to something of a simple, measured wizard, something like Merlin from The Sword in the Stone:

In fact elements of the story take on this wizard's apprentice dynamic with Percy becoming the apprentice of Penderwhist, just as Arthur was mentored by Merlin. The following designs were bent more towards this, with Penderwhist's design a little more streamlined. I took this 'light bulb' shape and developed his head around that, it became less geometric and more freeform and organic in the process:

What's Next?
The next post, whenever I get around to doing it will go over the story and some further designs for Percy and Penderwhist, the set design and costumes and whatever else I've got cooking. For now, I've got a few things coming up on my break, but come July, the wheels and cogs will be turning again and hopefully some more concrete work! If you've read all this, I commend you!

The new Penderwhist sculpt (top right) in the box with the other head sculpts.

Penderwhist's House concept sketch - the next post will show the Minecraft model it was based on.

2018 | Production Diary 4 - The Final Day | Film: Cycle

Thus we come to the end of the production on Cycle.

Note: I didn't take many pics on this final day, my phone was flat and Lachlan's extensive shots would probably capture most of the lighting shenanigans better!

The Shot List for the final day.

This was one of the longest days of the production because it was to be our last, we had the gallery space booked, the equipment and the crew and it all had to be done within nine hours. We had a few shots we had to pick up from yesterday, practical effects involving a bed sheet and some uncooperative fake blood. Başak and I had spent a little time the day prior setting up a way we thought the bed sheet might be installed so we could pull off the effect of it being the wall. Today we also had a tour of students who had been ousted from their normal class spaces to present their photography work in the gallery. We had to be quiet, they had to be quiet and no one was happy. We worked around it and the lovely technicians diverted the students to the spaces just outside the gallery in the foyer.

Our original setup for the sheet.

A crazy revelation near the end of the shoot was that most of the crew hadn't seen the script, only the storyboards which meant they were confused (along with our producer!) of what was going on and obviously that caused a lot of strife and probably left them wondering most of the time what the fuck they were doing. From the storyboards alone it's not very clear what's happening in this scene, because at one point we're meant to see Alex's double looking back at herself, the wall has to become a linen sheet for Alex to pass through, and it's all very confusing!

The wall becomes a linen sheet, revealing a second room that's the same as the first.

Eventually Danny found a way to rig the sheet up to some C Stands with clamps from which we could position the sheet at the small entrance to the room acting like a doorway. This was where we had to trick some of the shots because the sheet wasn't sitting against the other side of the wall, it didn't reach or look good that way. Alex, gaffers and anyone nearby had to hold the sheet as flat as possible just outside the frame and Alex had to have her body positioned and her hand floating in order to give the illusion of it being the wall.

A lot of the time it's about compromise, we didn't have time to faff about (even though we did faff about), we had cameras that ate batteries, memory that was bloated and little time to shoot on location. Cut shots, combine them with others, do multiple shots in one take etc. As the day went on it forced us to go with as few takes as possible, with exceptions. Nikki and Ramin frustratingly went through the shot list and storyboards seeing where they could film multiple shots in a batch - did it have the curtain (linen sheet), the blood, or the wall?

After we finished in the White Room we packed up all the equipment we weren't going to use and took a few bits and bobs on a trip to the final location of the shoot - the creepy tree. Nikki postulated that the tree must've been the work of art students past, or the den of the resident hobos or students who go there to do drugs. It's this tepee-shaped structure of various branches that have been stacked around a smaller, central tree and at night with the lighting provided by Danny, looked suitably ominous, a location straight out of The Blair Witch Project.

The tree in the storyboards.

Başak, Alex and I followed a trail down into the wooded area near the campus whilst the others packed the equipment, out there we could only see the faint lights of other people taking the trail with only the light of their phones to guide the way. Danny had already gone down to the location and set up a light with special filters, a cool blue that looked terrifying and otherworldly and made the tree look like some twisted nightmare.

Sadly, I had to dash three shots into the final scene as I had to leave to get home. My time on the shoot has been something of an experience, you never really know how much of the film is shaped until you're there helping set the shots and seeing the takes, talking with Basak about what's best and where we can make compromises. My presence on the set was akin to an observer, I sat back most of the time and observed the craft, occasionally stepping in to make suggestions, or make a fool of myself! As I had mentioned in my first diary post, it's a frustrating experience too, because there's obviously a lot had I been directing, that would be different. For this project I had to align my vision with Basak's and grit my teeth when we didn't take advantage of a good setup. I managed to get a few shots in that were my suggestions which I was happy about, it wasn't to go against Basak, only to help her see her film come to fruition.

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A special thanks to the crew who were all wonderful and professional, there wasn't a time when they were unsure or weren't working at the top of their game, everyone brought their knowledge of the equipment which helped bring our vision to life. Thank you to our actress, Alex, who cooperated and never once showed how fed up she must've been, we spent hours making her stand around forcing her to touch walls and fall over, snort fake blood and it all turned out brilliantly. A huge thank you to Nikki who handled everything with restraint and style and made sure we were all on track, our shadow director! Thank you to Başak without whom I wouldn't have had the chance to add my creative skills to this production, even though directing doesn't seem like her thing, she always was very respectful and understanding and was determined to have her vision come to life. Finally I have to thank Ramin, when I was asked to come on and help do the storyboards, we didn't fully know or understand Başak's vision, but we stuck through it and I have to give him props for pulling this entire production off!

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I don't know what's next for me film wise, the whole process has really helped me get back into the mindset of making films. Not long ago I chose to pursue my art career and gave up my filmmaking aspirations because of the sacrifice both options afforded. Filmmaking is a gamble, on all the strength of your ideas, the writing, the budget and the time you have - it's not a lucrative business until you get off the ground and become recognized. For me, I chose to study art because it was the one area I'm confident in and know a little bit about, I'd stick to the art side and that will hopefully lead back into film one day where the two worlds inevitably meet. You need storyboard artists, illustrators and concept artists, set designers, costume designers, an art department, and not just for film, that goes for television, animation and video games too.

Next year I'm doing my Honours Year with a few ideas already blossoming on what to produce, something in a similar vein to Cabbage Pot, something Stop Motion perhaps, we'll see...